I have been using Ask.com as one of the search engines to ping my sitemap. When I went to ping my sitemap today to have my sitemap re-indexed, the website (http://submissions.ask.com/ping) says it no longer exists? I did a DNS lookup on submissions.ask.com and it looks like Ask.com has removed the subdomain, but their Website Crawler FAQ still has it listed? Any ideas of whats happening?

Ask.com died as a search engine a long time ago. However, you can still submit a website's sitemap to it, if you wish. However, it will have to be done manually. If you'd like to submit your XML sitemap to Ask.com, simply type in the following in your browser's search bar: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.example.com/sitemap.xml, where example is your domain name.